‘Search Party’ Is The Show For You (Especially If You Hated ‘Girls’)

When TBS’ Search Party premiered last year, the first couple of episodes made me roll my eyes, even though the show was entertaining. Oy vey, yet another show about hipsters in Brooklyn having brunch, I thought.

But soon, Michael Showalter, Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers’ vision of the millennial sense of not belonging started telling an actual story, one that went off the rails in a good way. With season 2 continuing where season 1 left off, it’s pretty safe to say that if you’re tired of shows about twentysomethings in Brooklyn whining about their lives while sipping pour-over, fair-trade coffee and eating artisinal pickles — in other words, if Girls made you want to rip your nose hair out — then Search Party is the show for you:

Season 1 got weird in a hurry

Jessica Miglio/TBS

As Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat) tried to figure out what happened to Chantal Witherbottom (Clare McNulty), a friend-kinda-sorta who she finds out went missing, her “Scooby gang” were getting themselves in deep. Dory’s lanky doof of a boyfriend, Drew (John Reynolds) is busy complaining that Dory doesn’t spend time with him anymore and pushing up his glasses, but yet has time to get tempted. Self-proclaimed narcisist Elliott (John Early) fakes the fact that he had cancer in order to get sympathy — and he got a book deal after he told everyone. Vain actress Portia (Meredith Hagner) can’t help but show her crippling insecurities. They all get involved in the search for Chantal, to varying degrees.

The search takes Dory and the gang to a vigil for Chantal, which they disrupt, then Dory, Elliott and Portia go to a weird party led by a charismatic figure; Dory ends up seeing something she shouldn’t have seen after dinner is over. Meanwhile, a shady P.I. named Keith (Ron Livingston) is also looking for Chantal; when Dory flushes him out, they eventually sleep together.

Can anything that happened in the six seasons of Girls approach this? And we’re not even talking about the ending of Season 1…

Season 1 ends with a violent death

Jessica Miglio/TBS

Somehow, the ending of Season 1 is a shock, but it makes sense. The gang find Chantal holding up in a big house outside of Montreal, but so does Keith, who is looking for reward money. But he’s also in love with Dory; Dory is so mixed up by everything she’s seen, she thinks he’s coming after her, so she tases him. He hits his head on his way down, and then gets up and really threatens Dory; Drew hears this and hits Keith on the head with a obelisk-shaped sculpture.

In Season 2, we pick up where we left off, with Dory, Drew and Elliott trying to figure out how to cover up Keith’s death, with the same question being asked of Dory as the finale: “Was it self-defense?”

The show now turns from a bunch of millennials hanging out to a bunch of millennials trying to live with themselves after killing someone, trying to prove to themselves that, as Dory says, they’re “good, non-murdering people.” Let’s just say that we never saw Andrew Rannels or Zosia Mamet digging a shallow grave as the sun came up.

Chantal is a huge chore

Photo: TBS

This is the kicker of the whole show: After all of the hell Dory and her friends went through to find Chantal, after what happened to Keith, they find out that not only did Chantal run away from home (“It was so good to get away from social media!”) but she’s a lying, self-absorbed sack of shit. So the gang not only has to live with what they did, but also the fact that they did it to find someone who not only didn’t want to be found, but is a pretty awful person in general.

TBS is running back-to-back episodes of Season 2 every Sunday, but it shouldn’t be seen as a burn-off; Search Party is more designed to be a binge-watched show, like something on Netflix or Amazon. If they don’t get huge ratings for the Sunday airings, they’ll be OK with it, because they’d rather people watch on TBS.com, or their streaming app. So if you want to watch them two at a time, that’s fine. But, as anyone who binged Season 1 (like my wife and I did) found out, taking the show in one fell swoop is very a very rewarding watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.